Key Points
But right from the times of Hegel, called the father of the idea of the modern West, which looked at theuniversalism of the West and all of history being driven by a system of causationof theWest being the hallowed objective to which,through evolutionary stages,other civilisations progress towardsthere are some common features in the larger rubric of Western academic theories,right from Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Horkheimer, Kant, Nietzsche, Bourdieu, and others...
Popular Indian historiography also refuses to acknowledge, or negates, the darker periods of Indian history, especially the Islamic conquests, even as contemporary records of court historians gloat on large-scale Hindu genocides and the destruction of temples and universities...
We are presented with a very linear and simplistic narrative of the Indian freedom struggle, dominated by a single ideological stance, which vastly underplays the phenomenal influence of armed resistance and the role of revolutionaries, right from the 1857 War of Independence to eventually the heroics of Netaji Subhas Chandra Boses Indian National Army and the Naval Mutiny of 1946 that actually brought India her freedom..
While all well-meaning nationalists might lament the lack of initiative from thegovernment,when it comes to course-correction of our history, a small baby step that I have taken in this regard is the establishment of a private, non-profit, apolitical,andnon-governmental organisation called the Foundation for Indian Historical and Cultural Research (FIHCR)...
While someone like me,as a modern historian,might take lifetimes to study Vedic Sanskrit,where every word can have multiple meanings in context, nothing stops me from collaborating with experts of those languages to go to the primary source, the original texts,to decode them for the purposes of answering research questions.. These theme-based projects are envisioned by FIHCR as multidisciplinary and involve groups consisting of historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, numismatists, linguists, philosophers, geneticists, philologists,and so on..
